Mazal Tov

Bernie and Dianne Adler, who met at an Israeli folk-dancing class, become the first Jews to get married in Lincoln since the Jews were expelled from England in 1290.

“The last recorded Jewish wedding in Lincoln took place on the site where Jews’ Court now stands [and where the Adlers got married] in 1275, between Judith, daughter of Bellasez, and Aaron, the son of Benjamin of Lincoln. A document in Westminster Abbey notes that Judith married Aaron “for a dowry of 20 marks stirling and the 24 books of the bible properly provided with punctuation and the masora (the critical notes made on manuscripts of the Hebrew scriptures) and written upon calf skin”.”

The city is, of course, famous for the ‘ritual murder’ libel that followed the discovery of the body of a young boy named Hugh in a cesspit in 1255, resulting in the deaths of 19 Jews.

Not Really Good

Ma'ariv has announced the re-launch of its Hebrew site, now to be called "NRG" (Get it? Energy?). Verdict: lots to read; hard on the eyes; hate the naff name, which is another blow to the Hebrew language.

Update: Ha'aretz likes the horrible design. Oh well, I guess they'd like anything that isn't YNet.

D Bible is gr8

After Microsoft reportedly reduced the 24 books of The Iliad into 32 lines of sms to make it more accessible to the masses, The Sunday Telegraph has done the same for the Bible (with a little nod to the New Testament at the end):

Task 4 God: mke wrld. Job 6 dys. Rests Sun. Eve flirts wiv snake. Uh-oh. L8r Cain kills bruvver.
Floods. Noah: CYa! Scapes in ark wiv anmls 2by2.
Locusts. Dry soil/toil. Lots greybeards, hevy dudes, bum era. Moses & Co. exit Egyp. Moses parts Red C. Cool. Goes up Sinai, 10 rules, then Holy Lnd. Wait 4 Messiah. Who he?

Can anyone out there do better?

After Atkins

Christian groups have begun promoting competing, bible-based diets:
• The 'Hallelujah Diet' ("Drawn from Genesis 1:29," encourages eating fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds)
• The 'What Would Jesus Eat?' diet (non-animal-derived "living foods")
• The 'Weigh Down Diet' (encourages following "God's perfect boundaries of hunger and fullness")
• 'The Maker's Diet' ("Drawn from the book of Leviticus," encourages eating certain meat and dairy products and warns against an all-raw, vegan regimen)
My favorite quote comes from Rev. George Malkmus, who employed a researcher who determined that the Hallelujah diet he founded was deficient in vitamin B-12.
"This shocked me, that God's perfect eating plan could have a flaw," Malkmus said. "But we realized that fruits and vegetables back then were more nutritious because of the topsoil."
Actually, I thought G-d was pretty clear about his "perfect eating plan." It's called Kashrut.

Oh, yeah? Where are these people?

According to the Baltimore Sun,

"'African-Americans and other minorities are increasingly attending synagogues,' said Gary A. Tobin, president of the San Francisco-based Institute for Jewish & Community Research.
"'We fully expect over the next 20 years for the face of Judaism in the U.S. to change dramatically from largely a white, Eastern or Central European group to include many more Asians, Latinos and blacks,' he said.
"Tobin estimates the number of black Jews nationwide at 50,000 to 100,000, though others dispute that figure. James Landing, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago who has studied black Judaism, says their numbers probably do not exceed 10,000....
"At least 350,000 blacks, Asians and Latinos practice Judaism in the United States, according to a 2001 survey done for Tobin's institute."

UPDATE: Perhaps they're in Great Neck, where the local Reform congregation has just appointed Rabbi Theodore Tsuruoka, a Japanese-American convert to Judaism, as its spiritual leader. Hat tip: Reader TTC of Protocols.

Faux Bar-Mitzvahs, part II

More evidence of the increasing popularity of the Bar/Bat-Mitzvah ceremony among non-Jews, as I first noted last month. At least this woman understands it’s about more than just a party; kudos to the Jewish family whose daughter’s Bat Mitzvah brought her to that conclusion.

(Via Religion & Society)

In the name of the father

The Daily Telegraph has an exclusive interview with Saddam Hussein’s eldest daughter, currently living in Amman with her 5 children. She seems to be taking her brothers’ deaths and Saddam’s capture really hard:

“As Saddam undergoes daily interrogation by his CIA captors and Iraq is plagued by a bloody insurrection, the mother-of-five has undergone cosmetic surgery, works out several mornings a week at a smart ladies' gym and is often seen in Amman's leading jewellery and clothes stores...
“Jordanians who visited the Amman Surgical Hospital last summer... were told that Raghad had undergone cosmetic surgery on her breasts, and possibly also a tummy tuck last August, shortly after her brothers Uday and Qusay were killed in a shoot-out with US forces in Iraq....”
“Remarkably, one of their first instructions to the leading Jordanian lawyer, Mohamed Roshdan [appointed by the Hussein family to defend Saddam – M.S.], was that he should write to John Ashcroft, the American attorney-general, requesting the return of jewels from the former presidential palaces, and even the wads of dollars found with Saddam at the time of his arrest.
“These were the family's personal wealth, they said, and not state property.”

And before anyone counters that Uday and Saddam were responsible for murdering her husband, according to the article, her house is “a shrine to Saddam. Visitors ushered through the front door by a Filipina maid find themselves staring at a painting of the deposed dictator”– with nary a picture of her husband in sight.

Reading material II

I’ve started reading We Have Reason to Believe, the book which got Rabbi Dr. Louis Jacobs into so much trouble in the 1960s and which continues to divide British Jewry today. Several pages into it, I have come to one conclusion: nobody proof-read this new, expanded edition.
From the introduction: “The sam (sic) applies to the otherwise unrealistic story of Noah’s Art (sic).”
Talk about revisionism. No wonder he got branded a heretic!

Reading material I

I have just finished reading two books about intermarriage, Double or Nothing? by Sylvia Barack Fishman and Interfaith Families by Jane Kaplan. Both try to get across the personal stories of intermarried couples, rather than focus on dry statistics. Among the (minor) points which alternately fascinated and horrified me:
• The couple who brought up their sons as Jews, their daughter as a Catholic
• The woman who converted to Judaism 20 years ago – and still hasn’t found a way to tell her Catholic parents
Recurring themes:
• Jewish men who actively dissuaded their wives from converting
• Catholic women saying Judaism was hard for them to understand, because for them religion meant being serious about going to church and participating in other rituals – whereas to be Jewish “you don’t really have to do anything” (attitudes presumably picked up from their husbands)
• Catholic parents who secretly baptize their Jewish grandchildren
• Wives whose first and often only step in trying to make their homes more “Jewish” is to drag out Kosher cookbooks
• Kids in Jewish day schools who go to church on Sundays

I’ll be writing up a review of the books later this week, for The Jerusalem Post.

Sheagra

Israeli scientists have invented Viagra for women. Hold on, I thought Israeli women were "among the top "doing-it divas," whose "fast, high-adrenaline lifestyle spills over into their sex lives" ?? I guess that was last week.

(Via Jewschool)

Have rabbis faked 30% of Israel's weddings???????

As usual, the most interesting -- and scandalous -- part of this Ha’aretz article is buried at the bottom.
According to the article, one of the reasons Rabbi Bakshi-Doron is calling for the end to the Orthodox monopoly on marriages in Israel is his concern that too many rabbis are deliberately sabotaging the halachic validity of the ceremonies are performing.
Why would they do such a thing? In recent years, apparently, the Israeli rabbinic courts have taken an increasingly hard-line on children who according to Jewish law are mamzerim, or bastards. And rabbis are increasingly concerned that the issue of marriages they are performing, for various reasons, could fall under that category.
Sometimes, if necessary, they will ‘annul’ the marriage in retrospect:

“The rabbinic courts use every possible trick to prove that the marriage of the children's mother is invalid in the halakhic sense, even if it was an ostensibly kosher, Orthodox marriage. The antecedents of the witnesses were not valid, the rabbi did not mean it seriously, the ceremony was held at an non-kosher venue...”

And – here’s the scandal – sometimes in advance, without the knowledge of the people they are marrying:

“Among the ultra-Orthodox rabbis, confirmed horror stories are current about rabbis who admitted after the fact that they performed a wedding ceremony but beforehand intentionally did something so that the marriage would not be valid according to halakha. ‘And this isn't about the margins,’ said Bakshi-Doron at the conference of dayanim a year ago, ‘but about 20 to 30 percent of the state.’”

What a disgusting mockery this makes of halacha, of the institution of marriage, of our rabbis. If the rabbis really think the children could be mamzerim, they have no right to marry the parents. And if they have no reasonable basis to think so -- how dare they perform a fake ceremony?
It makes no difference if Rav Bakshi-Doron was vastly exaggerating and it applies to 'only' 5% and not 20% of marriages. If it turns out that Rabbis, who by Israeli law are the only qualified people to perform marriages in Israel, are deceiving the people they are marrying and not giving them a halachic ceremony, the Orthodox establishment immediately forfeits the right to insist on one. More than that: a full investigation is warranted into the conduct of what must be hundreds, if not thousands of rabbis, and the conduct of the religious councils / leaders / rabbis who knew and stayed silent whilst Israeli and Jewish law was being made into a laughingstock.

Starting 'em young

An eighth grader in Florida has been suspended after inserting a message in German in his yearbook, reading, "Death to the Jews."

Asking for trouble(s)

After Avi Becker arguing in Ha'aretz that anti-Semitism is good for the Jews, we now have Jonathan Sarna arguing in The Jerusalem Post that assimilation and alienation from the Jewish community are not necessarily bad for the Jews either.
His reasoning is two-fold: fear of assimilation drives the Jewish community to revitalization; and that "The young, the alienated, and those on the periphery of Jewish life, precisely because they are not wedded to the community's central assumptions, are the most likely to come up with innovative approaches and creative ideas," that ultimately help preserve the religion.
While this may be true in a perverse and paradoxical way, Sarna never really addresses the point that it's a much smaller and tighter community which remains to be revitalized.

Outrunning Arik

Ex-Minister Lieberman. 

Ariel Sharon has finally managed to fire Minister Avigdor Lieberman from his government – although in a typically Israeli fashion, it wasn’t just a matter of sending him a letter.
The reason Sharon is firing Lieberman and Minister Benny Elon is so that they wouldn’t be able to vote against his Gaza disengagement plan at the cabinet meeting on Sunday morning. Termination letters take 48 hours before they come into effect. Ie. – he has to fire them this (Friday) morning.
Sharon apparently sent the letters with delivery messengers to Lieberman and Elon’s homes. Knowing what was coming, they both left home in order to delay the sacking for as long as possible. They’re yet to find Elon (as of this writing). They found Lieberman, but having met him in person, I can confirm that his ‘hiding place’ was, in theory at least, indeed ingenious, possibly the least likely place you might expect to find him (other than at a sulha with Arafat): the gym.

From Jew to Muslim terrorist in 3 generations

I’m posting this although it’s almost a week old, because I haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere else in the Jewish blogosphere / press (? Please correct me if I’m wrong).
Last week, the FBI announced it was launching a manhunt for 7 alleged terrorists – including one American citizen, Adam Yahiye Gadahn, who is the grandson of a prominent Jewish doctor from Orange County.
LA Times has the family's story:

“[Adam’s] grandfather, the late Carl K. Pearlman, was a prominent Jewish urologist in Orange County who worked with various charities to aid Jews after World War II, according to a 1998 obituary in the Idyllwild Town Crier.
“He was also a member of the board of directors of the Anti-Defamation League and longtime member of the Orange County Philharmonic Society. The couple also served on the board of directors of the Idyllwild Arts Foundation, in the city where they had a second home...
“Son Philip took a different path. He is a free spirit who wanted to get away from the creeping influence of technology. Shortly before he moved to a 40-acre goat ranch in Winchester in rural Riverside County in the 1970s, he said he changed his surname to Gadahn ‘for reasons that had nothing to do with religion’ — only because he wanted a "new start."...
“But in the late 1960s or early 1970s, he picked up a Bible left on a Southern California beach. “I read [the Bible] and said, 'There's something here,'” he said. ‘I came to believe in God. There is a God.’
“Because his beliefs came to embrace many faiths, Gadahn said, he called himself a "universalist." ‘I don't like labels for religions; they don't tell you anything.’ But the faith that came closest to his heart was Islam.
He said he made Muslim friends, who taught him how to slaughter his goats in accordance with Islamic dietary practices. He became a halal butcher — one who follows Islamic law — and supplied milk, cheese and meat for a Muslim market in Los Angeles....
“In 1995, at 17, Adam Gadahn moved out of the family's Winchester home, his father said, because ‘he wanted out of the country and wanted to be in the city,’ where he lived with relatives in Garden Grove.
“It was then that the youth turned to Christian radio for spiritual answers. He wrote that the Christian fundamentalists' rhetoric held a ‘strange fascination’ for him because it was filling the ‘void I had created for myself.’
“But he ultimately rejected the faith because of his inability to accept basic Christian concepts such as original sin and the infallibility of God's world.
"'I began to look for something else to hold onto,' he wrote.
“Gadahn began using a computer, visiting Islamic websites and Internet discussion groups. He said he found the faith ‘fit my personal theology and intellect, as well as basic human logic.’”

Gadahn converted in 1995 and began to hang out with a group of Muslims who were not allowed to meet on mosque property because they were so hard-line. According to the mosque’s former president, “those Muslims didn't like the mosque's moderate teachings and protested its outreach to Christians and Jews. He said they printed fliers calling the cleric "the Jew," among other things.”
He is now wanted by the FBI for allegedly attending a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan and working as a translator for Al Qaeda.

Some forward planning would have been handy

Captain Hook... the scarier version 

The scariest man in Britian, the terrorist Abu Hamza, made an appearance in court today, to start fighting extradition to the US (take him! He's yours!).
According to reports, "The start of the hearing was delayed whilst security guards found restraining body belts after realising they could not handcuff Hamza."
The picture explains it all.

Two camels and a goat

This story made me run to my Ketubah to check out what my husband promised to pay me if we ever got divorced. Somehow I never really thought about the Ketubah sum before we got married (or until today, in fact). And now, I'm suddenly beginning to regret getting married in Israel. Let's just say, the hefty sum he named in Shekels ain't much in British pounds...

Is anti-Semitism good for the Jews?

An opinion piece in Ha’aretz argues it is, at least in the sense that it strengthens community identity, and results in increased Jewish activity.
Perhaps, then, the paper ought to soften its opposition to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon – whose policies, according to yesterday’s editorial, are partially to blame for Fritz Hollings and Anthony Zinni’s anti-Semitic comments over the last month. Can’t they resist any opportunity at all to pull a political punch? Ugh.

Jerusalem Wonderings

Check out this interesting new blog on Jerusalem life.

Shades of Yossele Schumacher

Jewish Agency rescues Yemenite family from Satmar

"'The Satmar promised to take them to a 'golden land,' but when they got here they found themselves in more of a Yiddish-speaking shtetl,'" said [the head of the Jewish Agency Aliyah Delegation in North America, Michael] Landsberg, who led the rescue operation."

Unfortunately, the JPost article lacks some vital context; these stories are not new. See here, here and (ref. to Satmar towards the end) here.

UPDATE: El Al slaps $250 fine on the escaping family for having more than two suitcases. For real.